PHOENIX—It took more than a month, but Seahawks coach Mike Macdonald finally rewatched his team's Super Bowl LX victory, doing so for the first time last week.
Macdonald has only watched the cut up tape of it, like he would after any other game, though—his wife, Stephanie, still wants to sit down together and watch the TV copy all the way through—and for Macdonald that first viewing felt a lot like his Monday film study after a regular-season game.
"I watched it on tape," Macdonald said. "Steph wants to watch it all the way through on the TV copy, so I think we might do that at some point… I haven't watched (the Super Bowl commercials) yet. It was cool, but it was the same feeling as watching any other tape. You get pissed off about certain things, but there was a lot of good stuff on there.
"It was like normal. It didn't feel like I was watching the Super Bowl. It felt like I was in-season, upset because we didn't take a guy to the flat or something."
The fact that Macdonald was downplaying his experience of watching the team he coached reach the pinnacle of its sport was fitting given his messaging when he talked with the media on Monday from the NFL Annual Meeting.
Macdonald and his team are incredibly proud of what they accomplished during the 2025 season, going 14-3 in the regular season before beating the 49ers, Rams and Patriots in the postseason to win the second Super Bowl title in franchise history. But they also know that the 2026 version of the Seahawks is starting fresh, and that focusing on last year's accomplishments won't help them win games in the upcoming season.
"We're a new team, and we have to rebecome the team that we're destined to be," Macdonald said. "There's a lot of new pieces, and I think that's where the focus is. OK, how can we get those ground elements back to where we want them? What's a better way in terms of our process? How can we do Phase One better? How can we do Phase Two—even though we're going to alter the schedule a little bit—how can we do those things the best we can and take those things to the next level?"
As Macdonald noted, the offseason workout program will look a little bit different because of the team's Super Bowl run in order to let players get enough of a break in, particularly veteran players who were playing a lot in the postseason. When the offseason program begins in April, younger players who didn't play a lot last season, as well as those coming off of injuries, will report as usual, but other players will participate in meetings remotely before joining for in-person workouts later in the spring.
"It was a shorter offseason, so I just felt like the guys needed a standard amount of time away from the building, so we're kind of tiering it, what we had planned out for them to come back during the offseason," Macdonald said. "Guys that didn't really play through that whole playoff push, young guys we're trying to develop or guys that are injured that we're trying to get extra hands on, we'll ask them to come back a little bit earlier, then the other guys will be remote for the first two weeks. Then starting with phase two we're hoping to get everyone back in the building and rolling, then we go from there."